The Illumination - Kevin Brockmeier

Written by Kevin Brockmeier
Read by Graham Rowat
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

· Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
Publisher: 2011 Recorded Books, LLC

What if our pain was the most beautiful thing about us?

At 8:17 on a Friday night, the Illumination commences. Every wound begins to shine, every bruise to glow and shimmer. And in the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes, written by a husband to his wife, passes into the keeping of a hospital patient and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely.

I love the soft blue veins on your wrist. I love your lopsided smile. I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you.

The six recipients—a data analyst, a photojournalist, a schoolchild, a missionary, a writer, and a street vendor—inhabit an acutely observed, beautifully familiar yet particularly strange universe, as only Kevin Brockmeier could imagine it: a world in which human pain is expressed as illumination, so that one’s wounds glitter, fluoresce, and blaze with light. As we follow the journey of the book from stranger to stranger, we come to understand how intricately and brilliantly they are connected, in all their human injury and experience.

—Brockmeier’s careful reading of his characters’ hearts and minds gives readers an inspiring take on suffering and the often-fleeting nature of connection.